Boulder film fest to honor legend Shirley MacLaine

Shirley MacLaine, center, a Kennedy Center honeree, set to receive Boulder International Film Festival Career Achievement Award, Feb. 15.

Oscar winner, best-selling author, and musical theater “gypsy.” Shirley MacLaine will receive the Career Achievement Award at the 10th Boulder International Film Festival, Feb. 15 at 7 p.m.

In December, MacLaine, 79, was a Kennedy Center honoree and watched from the balcony as Broadway stars — among them Tony winners Patina Miller and Sutton Foster — performed a tribute to MacLaine, who got her start as an understudy in “Pajama Game” when actress Carol Haney broke her ankle.

Founded by Robin and Kathy Beeck, the Boulder International Film Festival adds to hits impressive track record of top-flight guests, which has included William H. Macy, James Franco, Alec Baldwin, Peter Fonda, Rep. John Lewis, Oliver Stone and Blythe Danner.

“There’s nobody better than Shirley MacLaine,” said Robin Beeck shortly after confirming MacLaine would attend the festival. “She’s multitalented spiritual and dynamic,a writer, singer, a dancer. I don’t know what she’s not done.”

In 1984, MacLaine won the Academy Award for best actress in for the James L. Brooks’ weepie “Terms of Endearment.” With a career spanning seven decades, she has left a mark in film, theater, television as well as book publishing.

She began on screen in Alfred Hitchcock’s darkly comedic thriller “The Trouble With Harry” and went on to work with directing titans Billy Wilder (“The Apartment” and “Irma la Douce”) and William Wyler (“The Children’s Hour”), Vincente Minnelli (“Some Came Running”). She has worked opposite Jack Lemmon, Jack Nicholson, Jack Black and Meryl Streep.

From the start, there was something poignant, sexy and twinkling about the Richmond, Virginia, native, whose younger brother is actor Warren Beatty.

Including her best actress Oscar, MacLaine has been been nominated for an Academy Award six times. Not all have been for acting: Her 1975 documentary “The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir,” co-directed with Claudia Weill, was nominated for best feature documentary.

She also won a Primetime Emmy for her 1976 variety special “A Gypsy in My Soul.”

Still, awards and nominations only hint at the work MacLaine has done over the years. With critically acclaimed turns in recent films like the reality-based drama “Bernie” — in which she plays a hard-bitten widow who was killed by her much liked caretaker — and the beloved British television import “Downton Abbey,” there will vast territory to cover during the Feb. 15th event at the Boulder Theater, an evening that will include a montage tribute was well as a post-screening. Tickets are $30 and on sale at BIFF1.com or through the Boulder Theater box office, bouldertheaterboxoffice.com or 303-786-7030.

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.